Anpassningens politik - Två fall av institutionell och diskursiv avpolitisering av svensk ekonomisk politik under 1990-talet

This thesis explores depolitication as an institutional and discursive phenomenon in the context of Swedish political economy. Although a number of scholars have argued that depolitication is a process that operates on both institutional and ideational levels in politics, existing research has overwhelmingly been occupied with an institutional approach. Building my theoretical framework on two bodies of theory - discourse theory and institutional theory - I seek to enhance the understanding of depolitication as two-faced process operating on both an ideational and an institutional level within the political realm. I will argue that discursive power dynamics plays an important and unacknowledged role in the politics of depolitication as it underpins and enables institutional depolitication. By applying Peter Burnham’s (2001) theory of institutional depolitication on a Swedish context I will identify two institutional reforms that will serve as the empirical focus of the study: (i) the establishment of formal central bank independence and (ii) the implementation of budgetary discipline. In my empirical study of the political discourse that preceded these two reforms I find a distinct and dominant articulation of economic development as an autonomous process that occurs independently of political agency. This specific articulation operates by legitimizing the investigated institutional reforms as the only possible way to manage the economy